Wildlife Services, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that annually kills thousands of wild animals across Montana, will at least temporarily cut back on how and where it kills animals such as bears, wolves and coyotes in the state under a settlement reached Thursday with WildEarth Guardians.

The settlement applies to wildlife in protected areas like Wilderness Areas and National Wildlife Refuges, and also halts the use of sodium cyanide bombs on public land and private land in 41 counties until Wildlife Services conducts an updated environmental analysis. The agency will also halt its killing of black bears and mountain lions on federal land within the state.

WildEarth Guardians, an environmental advocacy group with an office in Missoula, sued the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in federal court in November 2019, arguing that the service must conduct a new environmental analysis, since some of the documents the agency relies on are outdated. Under the agreement, Wildlife Services must conduct an environmental assessment by May 15, 2021. The agency will also pay WildEarth Guardians’ legal fees.

The agreement is part of a WildEarth Guardians campaign across the American West to force Wildlife Services to update the science behind its operations, said Sarah McMillan, the group’s conservation director. The Montana settlement follows similar court decisions in other western states.

“We are pushing for Wildlife Services to get with the program and get up-to-date,” McMillan said.

“The go-to response should not be to go and kill that animal. There are prevention measures that people currently don’t bother taking.”

WildEarth Guardians Conservation Director Sarah McMillan

The number of grizzly bear-livestock conflicts has skyrocketed in recent years, said John Steuber, state director of Wildlife Services, last year at a meeting with Rep. Greg Gianforte and Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt. In fiscal year 2019, the agency investigated at least 156 reported incidents of grizzly bear predation in Montana. In 2013, it investigated just 25.

At that meeting, ranchers requested more funding for Wildlife Services to kill grizzlies, which are protected as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

In recent years, bears in both the Yellowstone area and the Glacier area have spread out across the landscape and been killed at record rates. The bears have seen significant losses of food sources in both ecosystems due to the warming climate.

Statistics like those provided last year by Steuber are hard to come by, McMillan said. As part of the settlement, Wildlife Services has agreed to post more information online, including the number of requests for assistance, the reasons for those requests, and documentation of any non-lethal preventative measures taken by Wildlife Services or the party seeking assistance.

The settlement also prohibits Wildlife Services from using neck snares to capture black and grizzly bears.

WildEarth Guardians believes the federal government should employ more non-lethal methods to resolve predator-livestock conflicts, especially for iconic and protected species like grizzly bears, McMillan said. Those methods include hazing by bear dogs, installation of deterrent fladry, and range riding.

“[When there is a conflict], the go-to response should not be to go and kill that animal,” she said. “There are prevention measures that people currently don’t bother taking.”

McMillan said increased data availability consequent to the settlement will ideally help prevent preemptive killing, such as aerial gunning. In 2018, 5,300 coyotes, 22 gray wolves and four red foxes were shot from helicopters.

The new restrictions are temporary pending a new environmental assessment to be conducted under the National Environmental Policy Act.

The future of grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is now in the hands of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

On Tuesday, May 5, the court heard video arguments in the federal and state governments’ appeal of a 2018 decision that restored Endangered Species Act protections for the bear in the three-state region.

The court has not indicated when it will issue a ruling. The ruling, when it comes, will not likely change the bear’s listing status, but could impact how the federal government moves forward with grizzly management. Regardless of any decision regarding listing status in the GYE, other grizzly populations would remain protected under the Endangered Species Act.

In 2017, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ruled that the species was recovered in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and no longer needed federal protections. The GYE, which includes parts of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, has a population of about 700 grizzly bears that has been expanding geographically in recent years — a sign, the service said, the bear has recovered.

A coalition of tribes and environmental groups appealed the decision, and in September 2018 U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen ordered the protections restored, saying the service’s ruling had not properly considered the effect delisting would have on all grizzly bears in the Lower 48, and was arbitrary and capricious in its application of science. Christensen ruled that the agency had given too much deference to the states, deprioritized the best available science, and illogically conflated two studies to determine that the GYE population possessed sufficient genetic diversity for survival.

The federal government appealed Christensen’s decision, as did the states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. Wyoming is appealing Christensen’s entire decision. The federal government is appealing portions of the decision. Montana has joined in the federal government’s appeal.

Fish and Wildlife has acknowledged that it erred in not properly considering the impact removing protections from the Yellowstone grizzly would have on other grizzly populations in the Lower 48.

There are currently two main populations of grizzly bears in the Lower 48, respectively occupying the GYE and the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem. The NCDE includes Glacier National Park and has about 1,000 bears. The two populations are not connected. Scientists have determined the Yellowstone bears likely do not have enough genetic diversity in isolation to continue to be a viable population.

Federal and state wildlife managers have said they would keep an eye on the Yellowstone population’s numbers and genetic diversity and potentially import bears from the NCDE to help restore genetic diversity.

“We know it’s genetically secure for 50 years, possibly a century,” said Joan Pepin, an attorney representing the federal government. “There is no need to do it artificially when it’s not really a problem and natural connection might happen in the next several decades.”

But Matt Bishop, an attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center representing the plaintiffs, said genetic diversity should be considered in a term longer than 50 years, and that almost every protected species would qualify for delisting if only the next few decades were considered.

Bishop also said the federal government has not committed to maintaining genetic diversity, but rather has said only that it will consider intervening if genetic diversity drops too low.

“Considering to do something in the future is not a commitment,” Bishop said.

Pepin said the states have demonstrated they want the bears delisted and would take steps to protect them in the future.

“Nobody wants to let this population fall back into a threatened position,” she said.

Pepin also argued that Christensen’s requirement that USFWS needs to consider impacts on the species at large is too burdensome. Instead, she said, the agency should need only consider whether the delisting of Yellowstone grizzlies would affect the listing status of the bears in other areas.

USFWS continues to maintain that the GYE population is recovered, and has said it will develop a new delisting rule that considers impacts on other grizzly populations.

Christensen’s ruling also concluded that USFWS violated its obligation under the Endangered Species Act to use the best available science in developing its delisting rule. Intead, the agency negotiated with the states and dropped a commitment to ensure that if wildlife managers change the way they count bear populations, original population estimates would be reassessed using the new method.

Attorney for Wyoming Jay Jerde argued that the 9th Circuit should overrule Christensen on the basis that methods for counting bears shouldn’t be subject to the Endangered Species Act’s best-available-science burden.

Bishop, however, argued that if the states change the way they estimate populations and arrive at, say, 1,200 bears under a new accounting method, compared to 700 under a previous method, the revised count could enable the states to kill bears with management removals and hunting, jeopardizing the species. Bishop said state wildlife managers would need to use any new method to reassess the 2002-2014 average population estimate to determine the number of bears they plan to manage.

“What Wyoming said in its briefs is it would always manage for 500 or 600 bears,” Bishop said. “That’s precisely the problem. The number needs to change with the population estimator.”

The state of Montana has said it wants the NCDE bears delisted as a distinct population segment, or self-sustaining section of a species. The federal government has indicated it will likely wait for the GYE case to be wrapped up before making a delisting decision on the NCDE population.

This story is published in collaboration with Bitterroot, an online magazine about the politics, economy, culture, and environment of the West.

During the four hours Dale Veseth and I spent on his ranch south of Malta last July, we saw two mule deer, countless songbirds, four long-billed curlews, a huge golden eagle, but zero cattle. Some rancher, you might think. Veseth, though, runs about 1,900 head of cattle on 27,800 acres. He keeps them clustered into four herds, which he revolves every 10 days or so among 90 pastures. At any given time, about 95 percent of Veseth’s spread doesn’t have a cow on it.

Veseth, 57, is an amiable guy with a shiny dome and a rich, brown mustache. Conversation with him is peppered with an odd formality; he answers a lot of questions by starting, “Well, my comment on that would be…”. A molassesy voice suggests an upbringing farther south, but Dale’s a Montana lifer. His grandfather started buying up parcels here in the ’20s, lost them all during the Depression, and then rebuilt the ranch bit by bit.

Veseth considered a career in academia — he has a master’s degree in animal science from Montana State University — but came back to the ranch in the 1990s. He’s glad he did, and I am, too, because he’s too much of a polymath to be cooped up in a lab studying one thing for the rest of his life. Over the course of my visit, Veseth showed me how to differentiate big sage, silver sage, and sagewort, and explained which grazing regimes are most conducive to each type. He spotted curlews from an impressive distance, and spoke for an unbroken eight minutes about invasive species like cheatgrass and Japanese brome. At one point, he gave me a handwritten compendium of 26 rangeland ecology books (Dale’s Reading List: Conservation 2016) complete with short summaries of each.

Dale and his wife, Janet, are intensely curious about the land they operate. Soil carbon content amounts to dinnertime talk. Three conservation groups conduct bird surveys on their land — that’s how Dale knows that curlews on the ranch usually overwinter in Sonora, Mexico, and return in mid-April. Janet produced a list of the 27 bird species a surveyor saw or heard during a recent visit, and was visibly excited about the “suite of grassland birds” found on their property. “It’s been a good year for lark bunting,” she said.

“With the politics today, it’s so easy to slip into negativity,” Dale said. “All this helps me stay positive, and I think it’s everybody’s dream to leave the land a little better than they found it.”

The Veseths may seem eccentric to outsiders, but their behavior is not tremendously unusual out here. The ranching community in Phillips County has developed into a remarkably progressive one in recent years. Many of them participate in the same bird counts, manage their land to promote wildlife, and use the rotational grazing technique Veseth deploys. It’s all part of a ranching ethos known as “regenerative agriculture,” which emphasizes grassland health as much as beef sales.

The prairie out here is about as pristine as you’ll find in the world, so some of the most innovative NGOs have taken a keen interest in this particular chunk of Montana. One of them is the Nature Conservancy, a global conservation behemoth that is teaming up with ranchers to preserve everything from grass to prairie dog towns; it started many of the programs the Veseths are involved with. Another is the American Prairie Reserve, an upstart in the conservation world that aims to reunite the old megafauna gang — wolves, grizzlies, elk, and 10,000 bison — that existed here before ranchers showed up. To do so, it aims to stitch together 3.2 million acres of continuous prairie habitat — the size of one-and-a-half Yellowstones.

Ranchers, for the most part, like the Nature Conservancy, and they, for the most part, despise the American Prairie Reserve. These disagreements have generated a good deal of press, and state lawmakers last year passed a resolution in opposition to APR’s plan. But lost amid the drama is recognition that the parties involved have turned this region into one of the most exciting laboratories in the West. Despite different methods of doing so, these people are grappling with the area’s complicated past in ways that could enrich its future.

The Land

The Northern Great Plains runs 450 miles north-south from Alberta to Nebraska and 175 miles east-west from South Dakota to Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front. Much of it is blanketed with soil blown here by long-ago winds or deposited by receding glaciers after the last ice age. That dirt is anchored in place by sagebrush and perennial grasses whose roots can extend more than 10 feet underground. These proved delectable to North America’s largest animals. Before the 1800s, a good portion of the continent’s 30 million bison called this grassland home, and they were joined by swarms of elk, deer, pronghorn, bears, wolves, and cougars. We think of these as mountain creatures today, but that’s because we chased them all off with our plows and suburbs. The ecosystem also hosted smaller critters like prairie dogs, burrowing owls, and black-footed ferrets, which commuted through their version of subway tunnels. Millions of birds still descend at this intersection of migratory flight paths.

When white folks came West in the 19th century, they pretty well messed everything up, at least from the perspective of the locals. Most of the creatures listed above were shot, trapped, or poisoned nearly to extinction, their turf transformed into today’s industrial wheat, soy, beef, and corn operations.

Dennis Lingohr / American Prairie Reserve

Bison on the American Prairie Reserve. Credit: Dennis Lingohr / American Prairie Reserve

In 1999, the Nature Conservancy, which manages some 125 million acres globally, laid out the case for preserving parts of the Northern Great Plains, which remain under threat from agriculture and urban sprawl. Months later, representatives from a range of national and local nonprofits met in Bozeman to discuss the Conservancy’s findings. One of the attendees was Curtis Freese, a conservation biologist working with the World Wildlife Fund at the time. “There was this realization by a lot of conservationists that the Great Plains had been largely overlooked during our era of creating parks and refuges,” he said. “Essentially, it was conservation flyover country.”

But one chunk of the region more or less avoided that fate. In northeast Montana, the grassy glaciated plains cascade south into the sagebrush scrubland of the Missouri River Breaks, a ragged topography that hugs the mighty river. Conditions for farming here are much worse than in the southern and eastern edges of the plains. About 9,300 settlers lured west by the Homestead acts set up shop in Phillips County by 1920, but quickly found that the government-given 160, then 320, then 640 acres weren’t enough — not enough water for crops, not enough forage for cattle. So folks bailed; about 4,000 people live in the county today. What the government wasn’t able to give away ended up in the hands of state or federal agencies, primarily the Bureau of Land Management.

All this yielded a global rarity: huge swaths of untilled soil. According to the WWF, 69 percent of the Northern Great Plains remains intact. This was the prairie land conservationists met to discuss in 1999. They agreed the ground was sacrosanct, but when it came time to decide on a strategy to protect it, factions emerged. In one camp were nonprofits that felt the best way to preserve this grassland into the future was to work alongside livestock producers. Freese’s old employer, WWF, was solidly in that camp. But the scientist had another plan. The space in question was big enough, the soil intact enough, that, he thought, they could go further and rebuild the prairie ecosystem as it used to be. The Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge could act as an anchor, and ranchers in the area were aging out. All the conservationists had to do, Freese figured, was buy up properties over time and swap out cattle with buffalo.

Freese had the science background, and was able to convince a Silicon Valley consultant and Montana native, Sean Gerrity, to join his cause and lead the fundraising side of things. In 2001, the group started the American Prairie Foundation, and recruited some of the world’s wealthiest donors to their cause. The effort to bring bison back to the plains was on.

The Buffalo

Damien Austin brought the truck to a stop. “That,” he said, “is a big old bull.” To our right, an enormous bison wallowed in the dust. The tips of his horns disappeared into the the shaggy cap of fur, called a bonnet, atop his huge head.

The American canon is littered with writers musing about how the West makes one feel small. The region’s Grands — Teton, Canyon, you name it — tend to elicit Muir-like humility; few things we encounter will so obviously and triumphantly outlast us. A 1,500-pound buffalo is a candidate for such treatment. That single bull staring down Austin and I had, over the last decade or so, undergone yearly swings from subzero temperatures in winter to triple digits in the summer. He won’t see rain for months, then will be pelted with an inch of it in a matter of hours. Multiply him by a thousand, and a bison herd is one of the most resilient collective organisms on the planet, the mammalian Grand. Today we have oil towns and tech cities; the West used to have bison civilizations.

But as I watched the animal, very thankful the steel cage of a Ford pickup separated us, I couldn’t help but think that bison are proof that the romantic permanence of the West is an illusion. Buffalo used to be innumerable, such a mainstay that every organism out here evolved to profit off their presence in some way. But in a span of 50 years, virtually all of them were gone. In 1872, hunters killed about 5,000 a day. A dozen years later, just 325 were left in the wild. We wiped them out in the evolutionary snap of a finger.

“Certainly I think of this as a place to restore a fully functioning ecosystem that has been lost,” Alison Fox, the reserve’s CEO, said. “It’s rewarding, it’s challenging, it’s globally important. We are working in this area because temperate grasslands are the least protected biome, and we are lucky here in Montana to have this treasure of native grassland with this rich wildlife history.”

“People say farmers and ranchers always want things to stay the same — no they don’t. We can be very progressive people.”

Fox’s employees, like Austin, are similarly inspired by this vision. He grew up on the outskirts of Billings, then bounced around the West before returning to Montana’s largest city to work at the local zoo. Shortly after, he started volunteering at the fledgling American Prairie Reserve. “It was just super exciting. The very first time I came out, I fell in love. I moved out as soon as I could get a full-time job,” he said.

Austin climbed the ranks, and is now APR’s vice president and superintendent of the refuge. APR gets a good deal of flak from certain ranchers for being headquartered in Bozeman, 250 miles away from the reserve’s western end, but Austin and a growing collection of employees do live out here. His kids go to school in Malta. He’s on the board of the local dinosaur museum. Most anything that takes place on the reserve, which holds about 800 bison, is funneled through him. If all goes to plan, the scope of his job will increase about eightfold as the reserve slowly adds properties and buffalo.

APR is possible thanks to the economics of ranchland. To make a cattle operation work out here, ranchers have associated grazing leases — they might own, say, 10,000 acres and lease another 10,000 from the BLM. The system gives ranchers access to land at a fraction of the cost of leasing private grass or owning it outright.

APR’s plan is to buy ranches and switch the grazing permits from cattle to bison, which are considered livestock under Montana law. By utilizing the very public-private infrastructure that supports ranching throughout the West, APR leaders believe they’ll only have to buy 500,000 acres of private ranchland; the rest will be public land. So far, APR has raised $160 million and scooped up 419,291 acres. It owns 104,244 acres outright, and holds grazing leases on the rest.

Even with the reliance on the feds, it’s still an aggressive acquisition strategy that, if fully realized, would yield a refuge virtually unmatched in scope globally.

“I don’t think we have a strong cultural memory, or a cultural memory at all, of the biodiversity and the richness of the prairie ecosystem,” said Danny Kinka, APR’s wildlife restoration manager. “I mean, the place rivaled parts of Africa in terms of its menagerie of large-bodied mammals. We know this from early explorer accounts and 10,000 years of Native American oral tradition.” A big part of his job, Kinka said, is “creating a picture in people’s minds of what it could be.”

On a cloudless July day, Austin drove me around APR’s Sun Prairie unit, the closest approximation of that vision. Sun Prairie is the most developed of APR’s landholdings — it has a campground, visitor center, a few yurts (usually reserved for donors), and about 350 bison. A big component of APR’s plan is public access; the reserve’s goal is to re-establish an ecosystem and facilitate its enjoyment by tourists and hunters. But as it stands, the place is a pain to visit. The closest commercial airports are about four hours away, in Billings or Great Falls. A four-wheel-drive vehicle with ample clearance (read: big truck) is necessary out here; my Subaru’s oil pan took a beating. When it rains, the area’s bentonite-laden soil achieves the consistency of modeling clay — locals call it gumbo. During a mountain bike ride along the Breaks a few days after a rainstorm, I got stuck in the mud and was able to crawl off the bike while it remained standing in the guck. Mosquitoes are oppressive enough at times to provoke anxiety. Every evening, a small pickup drives around Malta spewing insecticide out of a rickety, two-stroke blower.

Local ranchers are concerned that a full-fledged prairie reserve would upend the ag economy here, but Austin posits that APR will improve, not degrade, the area’s economic outlook. “For the most part, when an economy gets diversified, it gets stronger,” he said. “I don’t want to see the schools and businesses close down. Those are my schools, those are my businesses.”

APR is building another campground and some cabins, and is in the process of renovating a visitor center in Lewistown, at the southwest end of the reserve. But that’s about the extent of its plans for tourism infrastructure. That, to Austin, means locals have the option to cash in by opening hotels, bars, guide services, and restaurants geared toward out-of-towners drawn to the prairie. About the only tourism this area sees otherwise comes from die-hard hunters.

The Cattle

The Matador Ranch is a stunning property situated in the foothills of the Little Rocky Mountains. When I visited, a month’s worth of heavy rains had turned the fields into an emerald canvas. Elk and deer abound, and beavers dam the creek in the lush wetlands.

The Nature Conservancy bought the 60,000-acre ranch in 2000. Two years later, Dale Veseth and a few others came to the organization in dire straits. Montana was suffering a horrendous drought, and the ranchers didn’t have enough grass to sustain their cattle. An enormous financial hit loomed, so Veseth asked if the Conservancy would allow ranchers to run their cattle on the Matador.

Linda Poole, the Conservancy’s program director at the time, agreed to lease Matador grass, but landowners had to promise not to plow their fields and to prevent the spread of invasive weeds. With that, the Matador grass bank was created. Ranchers who agree not to break ground on their private property are allowed to graze their cattle on the Matador at a low price; if they decide to plow at any point, they can’t return to the grass bank. Additional conservation measures — installing wildlife-friendly fencing, participation in bird surveys, preserving sage-grouse breeding grounds — earn further discounts. Nineteen ranch operations now run more than 3,000 cattle on the Matador, and the program has been used to ensure 350,000 acres of ranchland isn’t being plowed.

“We identified people that are raising livestock and maintaining grass as natural partners,” Brian Martin, the Conservancy’s director of grassland conservation in Montana, told me. “The new paradigm of conservation is that people are part of the system. Be that in Montana or Kenya, it’s important we embrace those local communities and their expertise.”

Gib Myers / American Prairie Reserve

Yurts at Kestrel Camp on the American Prairie Reserve. Credit: Gib Myers / American Prairie Reserve

Martin’s willingness to work with ranchers — and providing them good financial reason to do so — made an often hesitant population more open to the Conservancy’s programs. “It’s education, incentives, and overcoming fear,” Veseth said. “It’s building that trust that allows you to take that next step.”

I visited the Matador with Charlie Messerly, a lifelong resident of the area and the ranch’s manager. Messerly oversees a collaborative effort here that’s rare for any industry. Cattle are rotated around the Matador in a few herds — essentially a large-scale version of Veseth’s approach. The participating ranchers take turns coming out to do chores; if another person’s heifer needs veterinary care, for example, you just do it.

“I don’t think, 20 years ago, it was on anybody’s radar for a conservation organization and multiple ranchers to work together,” Messerly said. “It’s not costing us millions and millions of dollars to buy and maintain land. All we gotta do is be good neighbors and work with people. … They want this land to be sustainable for generations. Everybody pitches in and helps out. We just need to keep these people here and these communities thriving.”

TNC’s influence has percolated beyond the Matador. In 2003, the Conservancy provided initial support for the Ranchers Stewardship Alliance, a local group committed to shoring up the ecological and economic health of area ranches. Through grants from NGOs and federal agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the RSA has held educational seminars and conducted grassland restoration work on more than 20,000 acres since 2016.

“It’s not all about sustainability — it’s about regenerating,” said Paula Enkerud, who was RSA’s executive director until October 2019. “People say farmers and ranchers always want things to stay the same — no they don’t. We can be very progressive people.”

One goal of these groups is to help pass ranches on to the next generation. On a balmy Tuesday evening, I stopped by the home of Ted and Katie Brown. Ted was late getting in; all the recent rain meant there was hay to cut. When I arrived, their three cowboy-attired kids scurried about.

It’s incredibly difficult for young ranchers like Ted, 34, and Katie, 31, to get into the business unassisted. Land prices keep rising — in no small part because of APR’s presence as a buyer — and it’s hard for small operations to achieve the profit margins necessary to stay afloat. So the Conservancy started letting young ranchers run cattle on the Matador until they could build up enough capital to buy their own spread. That’s what the Browns have done for the last five years. During that time, they saved enough to buy a 2,560-acre farm, which they’re in the process of reseeding to native prairie. Why? “Because farming sucks,” Katie said.

Over beers, Katie and Ted explained how TNC’s programs at the Matador have made the entire ranching community more robust. It’s far more than grass. In a typically insular industry, Matador members hop on conference calls and hold meetings to discuss management of the collective herd. They take turns performing herd health checks and rotating cattle between pastures. And there’s an egalitarian atmosphere. “Just because you have more cows doesn’t mean you have more say,” Ted said.

“It’s brought a lot of folks together to learn from each other,” Messerly told me. “It’s also essentially a large research station. We have a lot of different research projects that have taken place on the ranch over the years. That information is all shared with our grass bank members, and they’ve learned from that and implemented it on their private ranches.”

“I mean, the place rivaled parts of Africa in terms of its menagerie of large-bodied mammals. We know this from early explorer accounts and 10,000 years of Native American oral tradition.”

—Danny Kinka, American Prairie Reserve wildlife restoration manager.

Incorporating landowners has long been part of the Nature Conservancy’s playbook, but economic pressure in the modern West means it’s trying out some new tactics, too. In February 2019, the Conservancy bought 10 parcels totaling 4,340 acres, and will sell them back over three years to three area ranchers who agree to place conservation easements on their properties.

“We started with a phone call about some cows, and now TNC is a partner with us to the tune of millions of dollars,” Veseth, who is involved in the deal, said. “They’ve not only put permanent easements on the land, so that it will be perpetually conserved, but they also have direct input on how we manage.”

The arrangement means the Conservancy has entered a fray it long avoided: financing ranch operations. And it’s possible this won’t be a one-time deal. “It is a good model that creates some space and time for people, for these partner ranches to kinda get things together, and sometimes that’s what people need,” Martin told me.

Another nonprofit that’s taken an interest in what these ranchers are up to is Curtis Freese’s old employer, the World Wildlife Fund. “About 75 percent of remaining intact grassland is privately owned, and most of that is managed by ranchers,” said Claire Hood, who works for WWF’s Sustainable Ranching Initiative. “The ranchers that are working with us … these are cream of the crop producers.”

Making your cattle operation ideal for birds and prairie dogs doesn’t necessarily improve profit margins, but WWF is trying to change that. A pilot project underway since 2017 connects livestock producers with Costco Wholesale in an attempt to improve sustainability on ranches and traceability at the grocery store. The goal, Hood said, is to promote practices that improve grassland health, carbon sequestration, and water quality while adding a potential marketing benefit with a reputable, deep-pocketed retailer.

Historically, grassland ecosystems faced two forms of disturbance: wildfire and grazing. Species evolved to coexist with both. Ranchers, along with nonprofits like the Conservancy and WWF, are now managing their cattle in a way that recreates these systems, all in the name of improving soil health, wildlife habitat, and, they hope, the economic resilience of their operations. Oddly enough, this new management regime means they’re making their cattle act as much as possible like the very bison APR is trying to reestablish.

Common Ground

There aren’t many places where bison still roam in the mega herds like APR wants to create, but Yellowstone National Park is one of them. Chris Geremia, a biologist who studies the 4,000 to 5,000 bison there, helped me understand what the future prairie reserve could look like. He set a scene in one of Yellowstone’s most famed wildlife regions. “You can stand in the Lamar Valley, where you can look 10 miles or so in either direction, and you might see 3,000 bison,” Geremia said. “And they might be scattered into groups of 500 here, 200 there, 1,000 there, 200 there. And as you watch them over the days, they’re moving in synchrony, back and forth across the valley. They’re covering large areas — they might be covering an area over the course of a week that spans 12 to 15 miles in length. But they’re repeatedly moving together, and they’re using the same sites.”

During the growing season, Geremia said, buffalo act like lawnmowers. Their jaws are designed to graze short grasses, so herds constantly move between what he calls grazing hotspots. The continuous grazing keeps the grass short and in a nutritious state of growth, just like what you’d find in a well-manicured lawn.

Deer, elk, and pronghorn typically graze on fresh shoots in spring-warmed valleys, and then follow the emerging grass higher in elevation as temperatures warm. Not bison. A recent study Geremia led found that buffalo’s continuous grazing pattern, plus the aeration from their hooves and fertilizer from their dung, essentially restart the growing process in their hotspots. Get a big enough herd with enough space to move, and it creates its own spring.

From the air, you’d find these grazing lawns pockmarked with wallows — spots where bison flopped on the ground, rolling in the dust to shed winter fur or flake off insects and mites. The depressions act as water catchments, creating micro-habitats in this dry environment.

Elaine Kennedy / American Prairie Reserve

Sage-grouse on the American Prairie Reserve. Credit: Elaine Kennedy / American Prairie Reserve

Western meadowlark, grasshopper sparrows, and lark bunting nest where bison graze heavily. Hawks focus their attention here, where the sightlines are better. Medium-length grass on the edges of the grazing pattern hosts upland sandpiper and greater prairie-chicken. The long grass untouched this time around by meandering bison is where sedge wren and dickcissels hang out. Mammals — from prairie dogs to elk — adapt their own activity to the buffalo’s grazing habits, as do the predators, like coyotes and wolves, that feed on them.

A landscape like this is achieved only by bison allowed to roam freely, and whose populations aren’t heavily managed, Geremia said — the opposite of typical livestock management that seeks more-or-less uniform grazing of a plot of land. This symbiotic environment is precisely what APR seeks to build.

Tour the ranches around the American Prairie Reserve, though, and you’ll find pockets of landscape that look an awful lot like what Geremia describes — just without the bison.

It’s Kelsey Molloy’s job to help build these pockets. Molloy is a rangeland ecologist with the Nature Conservancy, and oversees the Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances program in the area. The program, developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, helps landowners establish management plans that preserve or rebuild habitat for grassland songbirds and sage-grouse. Participation means a rancher won’t face extra regulation on her property if these animals are listed as endangered species.

Molloy was skeptical of grazing’s benefits until she studied Canada’s Grasslands National Park, which hadn’t been grazed for decades. She found what was, essentially, an unkempt lawn — overgrown, fire-prone during drought years, and lacking in habitat for birds that like shortgrass prairie.

Her quest to help prairie birds now has her allied with area ranchers. “I’ve gotten a chance to go out to a lot of ranches, and ranchers just know so much about their property. It’s amazing — ‘This creek dries up. This is where I always see the foxes.’ I’m overwhelmed by their knowledge.”

By implementing lessons from Molloy’s program and others, ranchers have their cattle mimicking buffalo as best they can with rotational grazing. From this perspective, it’s odd that there’s so much conflict between APR and the ranching community. Ranchers, particularly young ones like the Browns, view APR as an existential threat. Signs around the area say “Save the Cowboy, Stop APR,” and the Montana Legislature passed a resolution last year opposing APR’s request to swap a BLM lease from cattle to bison.

“Our kids are fifth-generation,” Katie said. “We can’t compete with that big money, and you can’t make your neighbor not sell to [APR]. What’s left? It’s a huge threat. It scares the hell out of me. There won’t be anything left for our kids. It’s a threat to take our livelihood right out from under us.”

APR has taken steps to ease the tension. In response to the resolution, for instance, it drastically scaled back its application for year-round bison grazing on state and federal land, from 290,000 acres to just 12,000. But what’s happening here isn’t unique to this area of Montana, nor to APR being the prospective buyer. Across the West, increasing land costs push away young ranchers. Mechanization makes ranching less labor-intensive, meaning fewer people are needed to work the land. More expensive properties fall into the hands, increasingly, of amenity ranchers who buy up huge swaths of land for vacation or hunting properties; if they run cattle, it’s often for the tax incentives or to retain federal grazing leases. And young couples that do attain properties are almost always like Ted and Katie Brown: folks whose families are already in the industry (they split the cost of the ranch with Katie’s dad). Those who lack a succession plan sell to a willing buyer.

What is unique is that so many landholders out here, be they private ranching operations, international NGOs, or upstart wildlife reserves, are intent on keeping this grassland as healthy as possible.

“It’s rewarding, it’s challenging, it’s globally important. We are working in this area because temperate grasslands are the least protected biome, and we are lucky here in Montana to have this treasure of native grassland with this rich wildlife history.”

—Alison Fox, American Prairie Reserve CEO

During my visit last summer, I camped in APR’s Sun Prairie unit. On the first night, I lay in my tent, a breeze shifting clouds lit aflame by the setting sun. When the wind finally stilled, animal noise took over. Prairie dog barks punctuated the hum of insects that thickened the air like cream. Twice that night, I was awakened by bawling coyotes. Sunrise was an explosion of birdsong.

Bison are pretty common in the campsite; a nearby interpretive sign was clearly used as a scratching post. None paid me a visit, but there’s something about knowing that nearby these massive creatures, once lost but now returned, are moving in the same pathways of their ancestors.

Earlier, on the Matador, Messerly summed up the state of affairs on the Matador and the properties of grass bank ranchers. Sure, he said, there aren’t any grizzlies, wolves, or bison on these spreads. “But, other than that, this grassland is probably in better shape than it’s ever been. And it’s a different world today. This whole earth is inhabited by people, and that’s not going to change. So you’ve got to figure out how to work with people, and not just do it on your own.”

The Nature Conservancy, ranchers, and the American Prairie Reserve have different ideas for the future of this land. Rarely discussed, though, is the possibility this isn’t a zero-sum proposition. Folks are deciding between competing visions for the West, but perhaps they don’t have to choose at all.

“American Prairie Reserve’s presence and preserving some of these community traditions — I don’t think those two things have to be at odds,” Fox, the reserve’s CEO, told me. The “Stop APR” signs, she said, are “disheartening.”

“That slogan is so black-and-white,” she said. “It doesn’t reflect, in my mind, the common values and common appreciation we all have for the prairie ecosystem.”

A proposal by U.S. Sen. Steve Daines to convey the National Bison Range to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes has generated a mixture of excitement, concern, and outright opposition in Montana.

The provision, included in a broader bill settling the historic water rights claims of the CSKT, would restore the 18,800-acre range to federal trust ownership on behalf of the CSKT and transfer management of the range from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to the tribes. According to CSKT tribal attorney Brian Upton, the return of the bison range to the tribes was first pitched by FWS several years ago following a number of unsuccessful attempts to re-establish a co-management agreement — a history Upton described as “difficult and a bit of a roller coaster.”

“That’s certainly not anything we had asked for before the service raised it,” Upton said of the conveyance. “But it’s clearly an elegant solution to everything, and all it does is restore the bison range to its status before the federal government took it from the tribes.”

FWS had abandoned the idea in April 2017 at the behest of then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who cited his commitment to not transfer or sell federal land. But nearly two dozen tribal and conservation organizations have since rallied behind a push for bison range restoration legislation, arguing that such a move would correct a century-old injustice and enhance the cultural and ecological significance of the roughly 300 bison that roam the range. John Todd, deputy director of the Montana Wilderness Association, told Montana Free Press that his organization’s support for Daines’ proposal is grounded in awareness that contemporary public access to public lands is a direct result of the forced removal of tribal peoples throughout the West.

“It corrects an injustice of the range being taken away from them a long time ago,” Todd said, “and it really gives the tribes the opportunity to incorporate the bison range into a really rich fabric of conservation that they have there on the reservation.”

The bison conservation movement has deep roots on the Flathead Indian Reservation, dating to the tribes’ establishment of a free-ranging herd in the 1870s. The National Bison Range itself was born in 1908 when the federal government appropriated reservation land for the creation of one of the nation’s first National Wildlife Refuges — an appropriation that Daines’ bill acknowledges was effected without the tribes’ consent. The tribes negotiated two co-management agreements with FWS in the mid and late 2000s; the first was canceled by FWS, and the second was rescinded by a federal court in 2010, kicking off a decade of contention and uncertainty over the tribes’ future role on the range. The CSKT formed the nonprofit Bison Range Working Group in 2016, pushing for legislation that would restore the range to federal trust ownership.

“We wanted to demonstrate to folks that we share their concerns, and we felt like the best and most direct way we could do that was putting into the law itself that this shall not be a precedent for any other situation involving federal lands.”

—CSKT tribal attorney Brian Upton

While the heated back-and-forth over Daines’ Montana Water Rights Protection Act has largely focused on the water rights settlement with the CSKT, the bison range conveyance attracted its own set of opponents and skeptics. In a Jan. 15 op-ed in the Billings Gazette, Polson property owners Philip Barney and Wayne Schiele characterized the transfer as a “federal land giveaway” and claimed it would set “a terrible and inappropriate precedent.” Barney and Schiele co-founded a limited liability company called Protect Public Land in 2016, the same year Barney penned a letter in the Flathead Beacon opposing the tribes’ request for bison range restoration legislation. Their focus on precedent echoes the position taken by the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility during a 2016 lawsuit to block transfer of the bison range to the tribes.

“There has never been a refuge taken out of the system before,” PEER senior counsel Paula Dinerstein told Montana Public Radio at the time. “We’re concerned about it for this refuge. We’re concerned about its precedent-setting nature and it should be subject to a full environmental review as required by the National Environmental Policy Act before such a proposal is made to Congress.”

National Park Service employees voiced similar concerns about precedent-setting in the late 1990s when the U.S. Department of the Interior transferred management of Minnesota’s Grand Portage National Monument to the Grand Portage Band of Chippewa Indians. As with Daines’ proposal to transfer the bison range National Wildlife Refuge out of federal management, the Grand Portage transfer of national monument management was the first of its kind in the U.S. According to a legal review compiled by Upton in 2014, the Grand Portage arrangement was later deemed a significant success, with then-park superintendent Tim Cochrane proclaiming it a “merger of fortunes and perspectives.”

The Montana Water Rights Protection Act, co-sponsored by Sen. Jon Tester, addresses the precedent concern head-on, stating that the bison range conveyance is “not intended, and shall not be interpreted, to establish a precedent for any other situation regarding Federal land, property, or facilities.” Upton told MTFP the tribes specifically lobbied for the inclusion of the language, cognizant not only of past arguments against conveyance, but of broader fears in the West regarding the federal lands transfer movement, which has fought in Congress and state Legislatures to transfer federally held lands to state or local ownership.

“We wanted to demonstrate to folks that we share their concerns, and we felt like the best and most direct way we could do that was putting into the law itself that this shall not be a precedent for any other situation involving federal lands,” Upton said.

Upton further believes that concern about the bison range conveyance setting precedent for the transfer of other federal lands falls apart when considered in light of the land’s legal history. Robin Saha, an environmental studies professor at the University of Montana, agrees. Saha has been taking students to the bison range for more than a decade, and co-wrote a 40-page academic study of tribal co-management there in 2015. Saha waded into the current debate with an op-ed in the Missoulian last month, defending the benefits tribal management would bring to the range and accusing opponents of misrepresenting the range’s history.

“What some opponents fail to acknowledge or recognize, maybe purposefully, is the tribes are not a private entity,” Saha told MTFP. “They’re a government, they’re a tribal government within the United States, and they have a responsibility as a government to manage the resource for the good of their tribe, but also, under this legislation, for the good of the American people. That means continuing to provide access, that means continuing to manage it for bison.”

Even with the no-precedent language included in the bill, Montana journalist, hunter, and angler Hal Herring remains skeptical. Herring has spent more than two decades covering the lands transfer movement, and his expertise on the issue serves as the backbone of the new David Garrett Byars documentary Public Trust, which premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula this month.

Daines’ office did not respond to messages from MTFP requesting comment on the National Bison Range conveyance.

“I just think that more people who are public land owners need to be watching this to see exactly what this is going to mean, what the implications of this are,” Herring said. “It may be a great deal and it may be a really good thing to do. But I would like to see that somehow verified by an impartial party.”

The prevalence of chronic wasting disease in Montana has created “a new reality” for hunters and wildlife managers, just two years after it was first detected in the state.

An extensive program of testing deer, elk, and moose harvested across Montana from April 1, 2019, to Jan. 29, 2020, turned up 142 positives from Libby to the Hi-Line to the Ruby Valley to southeastern Montana, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks said. The positives included 86 white-tailed deer, 53 mule deer, two moose, and one elk. Additionally, the Montana Department of Livestock announced earlier this month that an elk on a game farm in eastern Montana has tested positive for the disease, leading to a quarantine of the facility.

State wildlife officials had expected the slow-moving disease to gradually spread across the state, southward from Canada and northward from Wyoming, both of which have infected animals. But statewide testing showed the disease is already present far from those borders.

“It’s now the new reality in Montana,” said Nick Gevock, conservation director for the Montana Wildlife Federation. “It’s showing up all over. A deer [that tested positive] was 50 miles north of Miles City — that’s a long way north from either Wyoming or south from the Canadian provinces. It could just be about everywhere.”

“It is changing hunting in Montana. But the last thing we want to see is hunters stop participating.”

For wildlife managers, the high number and wide dispersal of positive results in 2019 demonstrates that the neurodegenerative disease, which affects cervids and is always fatal, has likely been on the landscape for a while.

“We’ve got it showing up in places that surprised us,” said Ken McDonald, wildlife bureau chief for FWP, in a Jan. 16 meeting of the interim Environmental Quality Council. “We need to assume it’s more widely distributed than we expected or modeled.”

‘REALLY RAMPING UP’

In 2018, FWP tested 1,922 samples for CWD. In 2019, the state tested 6,977 samples. About 60 percent of those tests were conducted in priority sampling areas, including the Hi-Line, the southeastern corner of the state, and Libby. Priority sampling areas are locations FWP has determined to be at highest risk of hosting wildlife infected through the natural spread of CWD.

“It’s really ramping up, in terms of geography [and] species affected,” said Pat Byorth, a member of the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission.

Byorth expressed concern that the presence of CWD on the landscape could affect hunters’ willingness to hunt in areas where the disease is more prevalent. Public hunting is FWP’s primary strategy for managing cervid populations.

CWD was newly detected in 12 Montana hunting districts in 2019. Twenty-eight of Montana’s 165 hunting districts have produced a positive test since 2017. In some CWD-positive areas, the state sponsors special hunts to help combat the spread of the disease and generate more sampling opportunities. After a deer tested positive in Libby in 2019, the state established a CWD Management Zone, and testing determined that 13% of white-tailed deer within the city were CWD-positive.

FWP check stations throughout the state are responsible for the majority of the testing, but more than 1,000 of the samples collected in 2019 were submitted by hunters who wanted to know if their kills were infected.

The majority of tests statewide have been performed on healthy, hunter-harvested animals that show no symptoms of the disease, according to Dr. Emily Almberg, a disease ecologist with FWP.

In addition to hunters, food banks that receive harvested meat and individuals who harvest roadkill are also encouraged to test their animals.

The disease has never been transferred to humans, but the Centers for Disease Control advises testing animals before consumption, and recommends against eating infected animals.

In areas where CWD is known to be present and in priority sampling areas, hunters are required to get their animals tested and there are restrictions on carcass movement. Hunters who shoot a positive deer are allowed to get a new tag.

Martha Williams, director of Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, told the Environmental Quality Council the disease has so far had no discernible effect on the sale of hunting licenses, and that special hunts to help combat the disease’s spread have sold out quickly.

‘CHANGING HUNTING IN MONTANA’

FWP is reviewing how to move forward after 2019, and is looking at changes — possibly including heightened harvest allowances, special hunts, and increased testing — in regions four, five and six in central Montana, said Greg Lemon, a spokesman for the agency.

“What we still have yet to do is sit down with the internal action team, the citizen advisory committee, and go through what we learned, talk about what we need to do and [what] we can do as far as strategies moving forward,” Lemon said.

With the disease spreading, the Montana Wildlife Federation is asking hunters to sign its CWD pledge to use gloves while field dressing, properly dispose of carcasses, and report any sightings of animals acting strangely, Gevock said.

“Long-term funding is going to be necessary. We’ll be bumping up that request again to make sure we continue to provide those services.”

“It is changing hunting in Montana,” he said. “But the last thing we want to see is hunters stop participating. I was told by FWP we did not see a decline in participation this year, and that’s a good thing.”

Mac Minard, executive director of the Montana Outfitters and Guides Association, said that while the disease is certainly a concern for the industry, he’s seen no diminishment of client interest in hunting in Montana. He agreed that hunters need to act carefully to help prevent the disease’s spread.

“It’s a new reality, something we’re going to have to keep in the front of our minds as we go forward,” Minard said. “Within the industry, it causes us to examine our best practices.”

FWP: LONG-TERM FUNDING NECESSARY

Between 2018 and 2019, the state increased its number of CWD field technicians more than threefold, from eight employees to 27.

Last year, the state Legislature budgeted about $397,000 for chronic wasting disease surveillance. About 75 percent of that comes from federal Pittman-Robertson Act funds, which are generated by a tax on firearms and ammunition, and the rest comes from state hunting license fees.

Already, FWP is approaching that total in expenditures for fiscal year 2020, which runs from July 1, 2019, to June 30, 2020.

Since July 1, the department has spent $310,342 on chronic wasting disease programs, according to agency figures. The department also anticipates at least an additional $70,000 in testing expenditures before the end of the fiscal year, with the possibility of another $9,000 worth of testing, Lemon said. The agency will also have continued personnel costs for the program’s one full-time lab employee.

“Long-term funding is going to be necessary,” McDonald told the council. “We’ll be bumping up that request again to make sure we continue to provide those services.”

The holidays may have given most of us a slow news week, but it’s been a busy year at Montana Free Press, starting with reporters Leia Larsen and Eric Dietrich’s blanket coverage of the 66th Legislative session in Helena. Dietrich came on full-time in April, and editor Brad Tyer joined the team in July. In August, MTFP joined up with the Montana Newspaper Association and Solutions Journalism Network to produce a statewide reporting collaboration on the state’s aging demographics, and readers across Montana will start seeing the results of that work early next year. In the year’s closing months, we participated in NewsMatch, a national nonprofit journalism fundraising campaign and hit our ambitious goals, giving us some very warm feelings about the audience for quality journalism in this great state. And finally, in the year’s final weeks, we launched the search for another reporter to join our team, expanding our capacity to produce even more great journalism next year.

But that’s next year. As we wind this one down, we’d like to offer a recap of some of our best work of 2019.

Did you know what “companion bills” are for, or how they’ve evolved into a tool for last-minute horse-trading? We explained. Maybe you were more interested in how your representatives and their caucus voted. We built a tool for that, too.

Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, Montana U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte, and U.S. Wildlife Services Montana Director John Steuber, left to right, discuss grizzly incursions at a meeting in Choteau on Oct. 5, 2019. Photo by Tami Heilemann/Department of Interior.

Montana Public Service Commissioner Randy Pinocci speaks at a Red Pill Expo in Mesquite, Nevada, Nov. 9, 2019. Still frame from video posted by Red Pill University. Credit: Still frame from video posted by Red Pill University

While the exact language of the bill has not yet been made public, a draft obtained by Montana Free Press reverses a 111-year-old act of Congress that took the lands comprising the Bison Range from the tribes.

A bill that would settle a longstanding water rights dispute between the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and state and federal governments would also return control of the National Bison Range to the tribes.

While the exact language of the bill has not yet been made public, a draft obtained by Montana Free Press includes a section that reverses a 111-year-old act of Congress that took the lands comprising the Bison Range from the tribes. The Bison Range is entirely within the borders of the Flathead Indian Reservation.

Listen to John S. Adams’ two-way interview with Montana Public Radio’s Corin Cates-Carney.

A spokeswoman for Montana Republican U.S. Sen. Steve Daines said Daines plans to introduce the legislation this week. Daines Communications Director Katie Schoettler confirmed that the bill Daines plans to introduce would restore tribal control of some 18,800 acres that are currently part of the National Wildlife Refuge System and managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“This is part of the agreement and compromise reached in exchange for the tribe making significant concessions to water claims, including all in the Flathead [Valley]” Daines said in a statement to MTFP.

Daines last week announced his support for federal settlement framework legislation that would ratify the CSKT-Montana compact passed by the 2015 Montana Legislature and settle remaining disputes over federal mismanagement of the tribes’ water.

The deal also includes $1.9 billion to settle federal damage claims and to rehabilitate the deteriorating Flathead Indian Irrigation Project, which supplies irrigation to approximately 127,000 acres of agricultural land.

The tribes, in return, would relinquish the bulk of their off-reservation water right claims and be prohibited from selling water out of state.

“Restoring the Bison Range to federal trust ownership for the tribes is an elegant solution that would correct the historic injustice of the United States taking the Bison Range from the tribes’ treaty-reserved homeland without tribal consent,” CSKT Tribal Chairman Ron Trahan said in a statement provided to MTFP. “It would also save taxpayer dollars and allow the Tribes’ award-winning Natural Resources Department to manage the land and wildlife as part of the extensive network of tribal conservation lands that surround the Bison Range. It would mark a return to making things whole again.”

Daines and the tribes touted the fact that the legislation also protects public access to the Bison Range. Under current federal management, there’s no law that requires public access. Under the proposed bill, public access would be enshrined in statute.

Daines also says the legislation will save taxpayers $1 to $2 million dollars per year in management costs, in addition to $400 million the settlement would save taxpayers over a previous proposal.

The $1.9 billion payment to the tribes to restore and improve water systems is $400 million less than a previous proposal sponsored by Montana’s Democratic senator, Jon Tester. Tester, a longtime supporter of the CSKT compact, said in an interview Tuesday that he supports the compromise Daines reached with the tribes, and that he intends to co-sponsor the bill once it is introduced. “I will do anything I need to do to get this thing across the finish line,” Tester said. “It has to pass. If you take a look at the compact, it impacts about two-thirds of the state of Montana. I don’t think the water users want to end up in court.”

MISSOULA — Chad Bauer, a member of Gov. Steve Bullock’s Grizzly Bear Citizen Advisory Council, expressed a sense of urgency and unease on the second morning of the council’s Dec. 4-5 meeting in Missoula. Bauer and Bullock sat across from each other in a crowded conference room on the University of Montana campus. Bullock had recently announced the end of his presidential campaign, and Bauer, who works as a municipal market manager for Missoula waste hauler Republic Services, was three months into his role on the council. Bullock has given the council the task of delivering recommendations on the future of state grizzly bear management by the end of next summer.

“We should probably be eight or nine meetings into this, and we’re in our third meeting on a council that sunsets in August [2020],” Bauer told Bullock. “We’re in a difficult situation because you’re asking us to give you recommendations on how to manage bears in the state of Montana in basically the next nine months.”

The statement was a thin but pointed slice of a two-day meeting packed with presentations on grizzly bear conflict reduction, state and nonprofit education efforts, and legal constraints defined by the Endangered Species Act. But Bauer’s candor seemed to lift the veil on a key challenge facing the council. Kristen Kipp, a council member from the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, echoed Bauer moments later, expressing her concern about completing concrete recommendations in time. Bullock acknowledged that the council’s job is a “herculean task” with a “damn tight timeline.”

“This is very much a value debate, and I don’t think we can avoid the fact that it’s a value debate. Maybe you don’t have to hash out that debate today, but that part of it needs to be in your head now, and you need to know where you stand on a statewide vision for bears.”

—Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks bear biologist Cecily Costello

“You are the leaders in the state in shaping this understanding,” Bullock said, attempting to reassure council members and public attendees. “And if you can find some areas of consensus and understanding, that’s what makes legislative actions and others so much easier along the way.”

Bullock created the council with an executive order last July to secure citizen input on a statewide direction for grizzly management. That input, Bullock told Montana Free Press, has to include solutions to problems the state is likely to face as bear populations continue to grow and expand their range.

Though some conservationists have contested the statistics, biologists estimate there are about 1,000 grizzly bears in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, and interagency research conducted between 2004 and 2014 put the population’s average growth rate at 2.3 percent per year.

The future of grizzlies in Montana is a minefield of unknowns, with some elected officials pushing to delist bears in the NCDE even as a delisting rule for Greater Yellowstone grizzlies languishes in the courts. Grizzlies are increasingly occupying private property, whether on the plains or in interstices between recovery zones, raising questions about the readiness of landowners, agency managers, and the state of Montana itself. Asked by MTFP about how much the council should weigh the prospect of delisting in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems, Bullock said the council’s recommendations should be useful regardless of the bears’ legal status.

“I don’t think it should be that big a factor, to be honest, in as much as that we’re still going to have to deal with the conflicts and the challenges along the way,” he told MTFP. “The work that they do now, I think, will better prepare for when this really is an animal that we as a state hold in trust, that it’s completely our responsibility.”

The road to reaching those recommendations is a rocky one, given the wide variety of attitudes about grizzlies throughout the state. By design, the council’s 18 members hail from diverse pockets of western and central Montana, and their professional backgrounds include farming, ranching, the timber industry, and conservation. Throughout the course of the council’s meetings, experts have endeavored to provide council members with crash courses in grizzly biology, territorial distribution, legal status, and ecosystem connectivity.

On Dec. 4, the first day of this week’s two-day meeting in Missoula, five grizzly bear managers from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks were joined by bear managers from the Blackfeet Nation and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes to share their protocols for dealing with bear-human conflicts. Each stressed the importance of building social tolerance for bears by educating landowners and fostering trust between bear managers and local communities — a point reiterated during the following day’s panels on conflict-prevention efforts by nonprofits, including the Blackfoot Challenge, and on education and outreach work by the interagency Bear Education Working Group.

“If bears really wanted to do people harm, we wouldn’t have bears,” Glacier National Park bear biologist John Waller told the council. “You don’t have to be afraid of bears. Just respect them, and that will guide you to do the right thing with bears.”

“Some bears just have to die in order to better the species and the tolerance. If a grizzly bear keeps killing chickens or keeps killing cows or won’t get out of my yard or follows my daughter, it has to be removed.”

—Grizzly Bear Citizen Advisory Council member Trina Jo Bradley

But for council members Kipp and Trina Jo Bradley, a rancher near Dupuyer, social tolerance for grizzlies remains a distant prospect. The two repeatedly expressed their shared belief that residents along the Rocky Mountain Front have become frustrated with NCDE grizzlies that are expanding their range onto the plains. Bradley was adamant about both human safety concerns and the financial risk faced by livestock producers. According to the Montana Livestock Loss Board’s latest figures, grizzlies have killed 25 cattle and four sheep in Glacier, Pondera, and Teton counties in 2019.

“What we need is for these problem bears to go away,” Bradley said during Wednesday’s meeting. “There has got to be lethal removal of some of these bears … Some bears just have to die in order to better the species and the tolerance. If a grizzly bear keeps killing chickens or keeps killing cows or won’t get out of my yard or follows my daughter, it has to be removed.”

Grizzly mortality in the NCDE hit a record high of 51 in 2018, the same year the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem hit its record of 69. The leading cause of death among grizzlies across ecosystems is lethal removal by state wildlife agencies.

Ideological differences and focus on details occasionally distracted the council from its core mission. Late in the day on Dec. 4, FWP bear biologist Cecily Costello reminded the council of its broad goal of providing guidance for statewide bear management that can generate public buy-in. For example, she said, how should state managers handle problem bears that are captured between two ecosystems? And can the council even agree that connectivity between ecosystems should be among the state’s goals?

“This is very much a value debate, and I don’t think we can avoid the fact that it’s a value debate,” Costello said. “Maybe you don’t have to hash out that debate today, but that part of it needs to be in your head now, and you need to know where you stand on a statewide vision for bears.”

For meeting attendee Derek Goldman, Northern Rockies field representative for the Endangered Species Coalition, the council’s occasional slow pace and disjunctions are understandable. Of the council’s three meetings to date, this week’s gathering in Missoula was the first that Goldman attended. He noted that grizzly bears are biologically, socially, and legally complex, and making informed recommendations about them takes time.

“This council is probably still trying to get their feet under them,” Goldman told MTFP. “I’ve been working on grizzly bear issues for 14 years. So while a lot of the council has some background in grizzly bears, it’s probably a lot to digest. It’s a big issue.”

Caroline Byrd, a council member from Bozeman and the executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, acknowledged to MTFP that the council does have a habit of “chasing rabbits.” That hasn’t sapped her optimism. Byrd repeatedly spoke up during the council’s Missoula meeting in an effort to better frame its role, saying that with increasing numbers of both people and bears living in Montana, it’s up to the council to determine what each species needs in order to coexist. Council members are at a point now, she told MTFP, where they can have open and honest discussions among themselves and can move forward toward recommendations.

The biggest challenge, she said, is making sure those recommendations can survive any of the social, legal, and political changes that are bound to impact grizzlies in Montana’s future.